1. Technical Field
The invention is related to a system and method of providing an image-sharing environment.
2. Background Art
Digital Photo and Video technology promises to enhance our use of photographs and video by making them easy to store, access, and share. (Henceforth, all further references to “photos” or “photographs” should be considered shorthand for “photos and videos.”) Recent advances in media management and story telling have helped to deliver on this promise, but much work still remains.
The current model of photo sharing is through the use of online photo sharing websites. To share photographs on these websites, the user uploads copies of their photos to the hosting server, and their friends and family can view them by downloading them to their own computer or by viewing them while still resident on the server.
The current model of photo sharing is undesirable for several reasons. For example, the user already has the photos on their personal computer. Uploading them to a server is a slow and tedious additional step. In addition, many computer users that might like to share photographs are not computer savvy enough to upload them to the server.
As digital cameras become more affordable and digital photographs and images become more popular, more users will want to share photographs. At present, most servers impose a limit on the amount of space a user can use for photo-sharing—typically, around 30 megabytes per user. As more and more users begin to use the available photo-sharing sites, servers will have to cut down on storage allotments to support more users. This problem is compounded by the fact that printers and displays are supporting higher and higher resolution images (and hence much greater sized files), so that each user has a larger number of higher resolution images that they want to share, yet less storage allotment is available for each user to share these photos. As the quality of digital images improves, and greater resolutions and file sizes result, this problem is sure to worsen.
Furthermore, most current photo-sharing systems are server-based, meaning that the images reside in a database on a server. The server model introduces a whole new level of management headache. The user must remember where on their computer their photographs are located to upload them to the server. If the user modifies a photograph-color corrects it, crops it, or removes red-eye—the user must remember to update it both on his local machine and on the photo site. Additionally, other users must be made aware that the photograph has changed. Other users too must know how to get to the site and how to find the modified image once there.
Another issue related to photo sites that allow sharing of photographs on the Internet is that photos are normally thought of as being extremely personal items. People are often hesitant to load their personal pictures up to a large server database, accessible to the entire world. For instance, pictures of one's children or pictures of the inside of one's home are typically held more closely than pictures of famous monuments or pictures of scenery taken on a family vacation. Most people do not want pictures of their children or family posted where they are available to anyone with access to the site.
Another problem associated with the management of photos is related to their indexing, search and retrieval. Consumer research has found that the organization and retrieval of photos and other digital images is a great source of frustration to many users of photo-sharing sites. There are a number of image management products that allow a user to search and retrieve visual information based on annotations associated with images. They allow a user to sort media by name, file type, or folder and browse through files as thumbnails or as textual lists. Some such image management products allow a user to perform key-word searches. They search the images based on keywords entered by the user and retrieve the images based on annotations or ‘metadata’ associated with each image. Metadata is basically data about data. For example, the title, subject, author, creation date, location, subject and size of a file constitute metadata about that file. The disadvantage with using this keyword scheme for image data retrieval is that it usually means that keywords and textual annotations must be manually entered for each image file. This is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Additionally, for a search engine to identify an image based on such annotations, much annotation data must be entered for each image to increase the likelihood of obtaining a match between a user-entered keyword and an annotation related to a particular image.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is a much better model for sharing photographs and other images. The user can keep their photographs on their own computer, where they already are. Server storage limitations and problems related to updating multiple copies in different stores are resolved. The user can leverage existing “buddy lists” from Instant Messaging software to manage distribution of the photographs to selected circles of friends. A famous P2P file sharing system is Napster, where users exchange audio files over the Internet, each user maintaining their audio files on their own computer. The Napster servers maintain an index of all audio files and associated users that are on-line at a given time. The obvious problem with this P2P approach is that the two peers might not have their machines on at the same time.
For most people, having P2P ready access to a larger number of photos could enable many exciting new scenarios. For example, it could allow pictures of growing children to be automatically sent to a small circle of “photo” friends, conceivably as a screen saver that would automatically appear on these users computers automatically. However, if it were possible to at least potentially have access to a large number of peers, instead of just the small circle of people, the possibilities grow. At first this seems like a useless feature for a photo database. After all, why would someone want to look at the vacation photos from someone they didn't know? It is true that images are taken to capture a specific emotional, social moment. And it is further true that sharing this moment has historically been the primary use of photography. However, photographs also have another property: a photo is taken at a particular moment at a particular location. And this property in itself, when extracted over a large number of photos, can become as important as the emotional context. It can, in fact, be used to enable a broad range of completely new photo capabilities. For instance, if every photograph ever taken was available in a single worldwide database, and could be queried by the date and location where it was taken, many useful scenarios can be envisioned. A traveler planning to go to Rome in February could look at all of the photos taken in Rome in February to determine what the weather is like there that time of year. It could allow people to see pictures of a newsworthy or entertainment event that occurred. It could allow people to locate photos of themselves at a particular place or event. It could allow people to independently verify images in advertisements—such as what a particular hotel looks like.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for allowing users to easily share photos with a specific small group of people, a larger group of people, or the whole world. It should overcome the difficulties of loading a user's photos to a server database. It should overcome server storage limitations, and it should ensure that photographs/images throughout the system are updated when one copy of the photograph/image is updated. Furthermore, it should ensure that available photos are easily locatable by all users, and allow transfer of photos even when users desiring to exchange photos are not on-line at the same time. Last but not least, it should allow the user to maintain the desired level of privacy with respect to their photographs/images and limit access to them accordingly. A system and method that encourages user to share a greater number of images would provide for a system that allows photographs and other images to provide more utility than just their social and emotional benefits.